Ravenous Beasts, page 1
RAVENOUS BEASTS
THE WAIF IN THE WILDS
LAURETTA HIGNETT
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Thank you
A little more…
CHAPTER 1
“Officer! Hey, officer. Hello? I need to report a crime!”
I clenched my teeth, stifling a groan, and refused to turn and face the man who had the nerve to approach me. So far, most people on the street had avoided even looking at me as they walked by. My cop outfit was as good as bright colors on a venomous snake, signaling to the general public that I was dangerous and to be avoided at all costs. I’d backed it up with the most vicious resting bitch face I could summon, although I barely even had to fake it. For once, I just let my true emotions settle on my face.
I felt like I was nearing my breaking point. Again. Fear and anxiety swirled in my gut, threatening to overwhelm me.
The man was obviously an idiot. He ignored all my signals and came closer, clearing his throat, deliberately trying to get my attention. “Officer. There’s been a crime committed, and I need to report it immediately.”
I couldn't afford to be distracted right now. I had only just missed the two agents by minutes when they disappeared inside the hotel. They’d be coming out sooner or later, and I couldn’t afford to miss them again.
The monstrosity of a hotel was huge; hundreds and hundreds of tiny closet-like rooms built for traveling penny-pinchers coming into the capital, so going door-to-door wasn’t an option. The reception staff inside wouldn’t tell me shit without a warrant, and trying to interpret their thoughts was difficult even when I knew the right questions to ask. So, rather than follow the agents in and get noticed, I decided to wait for them to come out and confront them. They might appear any minute; I couldn’t miss them.
I pursed my lips and eyeballed the middle-aged white man who deliberately moved into my line of sight. He was a short, burly man with wide shoulders and a paunchy gut, wearing a clean blue flannel shirt and cuffed blue jeans. He swaggered over to me without fear or hesitation, obviously used to throwing his weight around. His eyes bulged slightly; his pointed jaw clenched with barely disguised outrage. Something had gone wrong in his life, and he was here to make it my problem.
He wasn’t alone. Immediately, my eyes flicked past him to what must be his wife—a worn-out looking woman with a square face and thin lips, wearing a yellow polka-dot housedress, her hair drawn back in a tight bun.
She looked both terrified and defiant. I glanced away, returning my gaze to the hotel doors.
The agents might come out at any second. If I missed them, I’d miss my chance to find my mom. “What crime?” I asked in a bored tone.
“Grand theft auto,” the man boomed, squaring up to me, blocking my line of sight to the hotel door. “My car has been stolen.”
“Gerard, please,” the woman behind him pleaded softly. “Don’t do this.”
The pain in her voice penetrated my anxiety. My eyes flicked over her again, and I watched her anguish play out in her thoughts.
The man grunted harshly. “Quiet, Gail. This is your fault.” He turned to glare at me again. “Grand theft auto. My car has been stolen. I need to report it. Now.”
My gut boiled with rage, but again, I hid it well. I sighed heavily and drew out my little black notebook. With one eye on the hotel door, I opened the book to a new page and clicked my pen. “Go ahead.”
The man drew himself up, so he was almost as tall as me, and took a deep breath. “My son has stolen my car.”
“Gerard–”
“Quiet!”
His wife flinched back. I recognized the gesture, and the rage in my belly threatened to burn a hole in me.
“As I was saying,” he said softly, getting right in my face. “My son has stolen my car. I want him found and arrested immediately.”
“Start from the beginning,” I said, still using my bored voice, keeping my eyes on the door. “What’s your son’s name?”
“Patrick Larson. I’m Gerard Larson.”
I scribbled a drawing of a penis on my blank page. “Your address?”
He rattled off a series of numbers, and I put a little straw hat on the penis. “It’s just there,” Gerard said, pointing down a side street towards a compact old cottage, one of a row of semi-detached houses.
“And you’ve only just become aware of this crime, now?”
“I just found out.” He inhaled heavily through his nose, snorting like an angry Minotaur. “My son just turned eighteen; he’s an adult. He needs to learn to take responsibility for his actions. I let him have a car to drive to practice and to go to his after-school job in the garage.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Practice, Mr. Larson?”
“Wrestling.” The man squared his shoulders. “We’re a wrestling family. He’s been competing his whole life.”
A quick glance at Mrs. Larson told me that Patrick had always hated it. She knew, but she made him do it anyway, just to keep the peace at home.
Mr. Larson drew himself up further, subconsciously trying—and failing—to make himself taller than me. “I was All-State; my daddy made the Olympic team back in his day. There was no reason why Patrick shouldn’t go all the way.” His mouth twisted. “And yesterday, I found out that he quit the team months ago. And worse, he doesn’t even work in the garage anymore. He quit that, too. Billy told me he hasn’t clocked in for weeks now.” A fleck of spit landed on my hand; Mr. Larson’s anger was beginning to bubble over. “Patrick’s a damn lazy layabout,” he seethed. “He doesn’t want to work hard. He’s crapping on the hard work of me, my daddy, and my granddaddy. We all worked in the garage all through school and college; it’s good, honest work. So, when he came home last night I took the car keys off him and told him to get the hell out of my house.”
I arched an eyebrow. “You kicked him out?”
“Damned right I did.”
“Okay.” I drew a little smiley face on my penis and added a flower to his straw hat. “And then what happened?”
“He broke into my house last night and stole the car keys back and took off. So, I want him arrested.”
My gaze drifted between the vile thoughts of Mr. Larson and his wife, who added a little more to the story. I had to clench my fist for a second to stop myself from punching him in the face.
This suburb, on the outskirts of the city, was one of the last neighborhoods in Washington DC to be completely gentrified. It wasn’t sure what it wanted to be yet—a cozy residential area, an industrial haven, a shopping district, or hotel chain hotspot. The area was a melting-pot of demographics, filled with young professionals, big families, and lower-middle-class hard-working people who had somehow managed to hold on to their houses, like Mr. Larson here. Sometime in the next ten years, all these poorer families would be forced out in favor of high-rises as more developers moved in. Right now, I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for him.
Mr. Larson had marched straight out of his run-down little bluestone house and charged straight up to me with all the rage and audacity a middle-aged white man could possibly possess.
I kept one eye on the hotel door. “Your son is still in school?”
“Yes.”
“And you kicked him out of his home?”
“He’s eighteen. I’ll give you his name and description—”
“Back up a bit, Gerry.” I held up my hand to cut him off. His wife’s thoughts had already given me everything I needed. “Just answer my questions. Where did you get the car from?”
His nostrils flared. He was outraged to be spoken to like that, especially from a young woman like me. “It’s a used car. We bought it outright through the garage.”
“The garage your son works at?”
“Yes. I got him the job through an old buddy of mine.” His jaw clenched again.
“And he quit the job?”
“Yeah.”
“And he quit the wrestling team, too?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Do you know why he quit?”
Gerard Larson’s face screwed up in disgust. “He said he’s on some computer geek team now, some sissy game thing. He doesn’t have time for wrestling anymore. After all I’ve done for him—”
I cut him off again. “Tell me more about this sissy game thing, Mr. Larson. Humor me. What is it?”
He glared at me obstinately. “I don’t know. It’s a worthless pile of horseshit.”
I arched my eyebrow at the woman behind him. She swallowed, gathered herself, and thrust out her chin defiantly. “Patrick has been on a code team at school for the past few years. A month ago, he presented a project to a new robotics tech startup, and got selected for their development team—”
“It’s a bunch of horseshit,” Gerard snapped, interrup
I held up my hand in front of his face again. “Do you mean to tell me your son got selected for Mintech’s robotics team?”
Gerard’s mouth dropped open. “Listen, lady—”
“Officer.” I snapped. “You’ll address me as Officer Sassin, or you won’t address me at all. Do you understand?”
Gerard’s nostrils flared; his face turned red.
I clicked my pen. “Who paid for the car?”
No answer.
I deliberately leaned sideways and arched an eyebrow at the woman behind him. “Patrick did,” she said. “He got a second job, working from home at night, doing some coding—”
“I let him have it,” Gerard snarled. “He showed up at home with it. It should have taken him years to pay it off.”
“But he was already working at the garage. Why did he need a second job? What did he do with the money he made at the garage?”
“That’s to pay his rent.”
“You charge your child rent? To live in his own house?”
He got right in my face. “It’s my house. He needs to learn to make his own way in this world.”
I laughed out loud. Gerard leaned back slightly, taken off guard. “I think you’ve taught him a great lesson, sweetheart. It seems like he’s made his own way in the world, and the best place for him is far, far away from you. You know Mintech’s programmers make around two-hundred thousand a year?”
He inhaled heavily, snorting through his nose, trying to keep his anger under control. “Listen here. My car has been stolen. I want him found and arrested. Immediately.”
I locked eyes with him. “Whose name is the car in?”
He didn’t answer.
“Who is paying the insurance on it?”
His jowls wobbled. Gerard was close to a meltdown. I let out a long sigh, adding a cape to my smiley straw-hat wearing penis drawing, and put my notebook away. This is what happens when bullies are left to their own devices for too long, with nobody to fight them. They just. Keep. Going.
Malik always said that I’m a magnet for monsters, and I was starting to believe it. Somehow, the worst assholes seem to find me and demand my attention.
But I didn't have time for this shit right now. I’d spent two days running around the city, hiding behind menus in diners, listening to whispered conversations and surreptitiously watching people’s thoughts, trying to get information on where the FBI was holding my mom.
My mom, Linda Tor—the fractured god, a splinter of the Ruler archetype. The physical manifestation of the Blindness of Ambition. She was, in fact, a lost god from a Creator dimension, trapped in the mortal realm, doomed to reincarnate along with the rest of us human souls.
The news that she was my mom had almost knocked me senseless, but I should have seen it coming a mile away. This was the woman who would do anything to achieve her ambitions, even when it was completely contrary to her morals. Even the people around her lost themselves in the blindness of ambition.
My mom always wanted to change the world. She dreamed of a socialist America, a place where everyone had a safety net. Where nobody was poor, no one went hungry, and no one was bankrupted and forced to live in their car because they lost a leg or their kid got cancer. Mom stripped her way through nursing school, took my father’s millions in exchange for custody of me, and ignored the many crimes her assistant, Gretel, committed in order to get her elected to local government.
Gretel was in jail now, and Mom had already forgotten her. She was running for congress, and one of her more proactive rivals had put a hit out on her—most probably, ironically enough, influenced by Mom herself. The essence of Blind Ambition was obviously leaking a little. It seemed like the people around her would still do anything to achieve their goals.
The second the job hit the dark web, Malik Malleus had taken the contract through his own private security and mercenary agency, Hellix. It was imperative that we got to her first before someone else killed her.
A sick feeling squirmed in my belly. I hadn’t told Malik. He didn’t know Linda Tor was my mom—it wasn’t public knowledge, and the most interaction I ever had with her was in the years when I was offline, no longer an active wetworker, and Sweet Dumb Chloe had control of my body.
Sweet Dumb Chloe constructed a narrative she desperately craved—that Linda Tor was a doting mother who graciously shared custody with the man who accidentally got her pregnant, when in reality, she was a woman who sold off her child to further her career, turning a blind eye to her bruises and ignoring the unsettling things she said on the few occasions she had visitation.
Unsurprisingly, Mom had been delighted when Sweet Chloe had appeared back in her life at sixteen years old, and she embraced the narrative that was thrust on her. My friends, Prue and Sandy, still thought that my mom was a wonderful, caring, devoted mother.
But as far as Hellix knew, my mother was a nameless stripper who sold her child to Harry West, evil billionaire. Malik didn’t know that my mother was the god of blind ambition.
And I didn’t know how to tell him. I was scared and confused. I didn’t know what it meant.
While I dithered on what to tell him, on how to tell him, the situation had gotten worse. The contract her political rival had put out on her was still active—despite Hellix taking it and offering a reduced rate for exclusivity. And worse, the feds had somehow become aware of the threat, and they’d taken Mom into custody for her own protection. She had disappeared.
And even worse, two other agencies had picked up the contract, so now, it was a race against time to find her. If someone else got to her and killed her before she was Awakened…
The consequences were mind-boggling. The entire world was at stake. The whole universe, in fact. If Mom died now and got stuck in the cycle of human reincarnation, we would definitely run out of time.
The news that my mother was a fractured god had almost broken me, but I mentally wrestled Sweet Dumb Chloe back into a little box in my psyche and got to work.
Malik had flown us to the capital to try to find her. It hadn’t taken me long to find out which FBI agents had taken custody of Mom, but they’d kept her on the move since we’d arrived, funneling her in and out of three different hotels in the city. No sooner had they stashed her somewhere, they were moving her out again before we could sneak in. I’d spent a sleepless night in a rental car outside a shabby hotel downtown, trying to decide what to tell Malik when we finally found her.
Because when we found her, Malik would Awaken her. Then, he would stab her with a silver dagger, and her mortal shell would dissolve, sending her back to the Wilds—the creator realm.
I didn’t want her to go. I had never even spoken to her properly.
My mom didn’t know the real me. She only ever knew the two fake versions of me—Ice-Cold Killer Chloe, the little girl who lied to her face during scheduled visits, and then later, Sweet Dumb Chloe, the girl who I desperately wanted to be. I had so much rage inside me, so much anger for the woman who didn’t see what my father had done to me my whole life. I needed to talk to her. I wanted her to see who I really was.
I was unraveling at the seams. And to make things worse, only half an hour ago, Malik had gotten a phone call from one of his brothers and disappeared in the middle of our stakeout, abandoning me without explanation.
Something was seriously wrong. Finding my mom was our number one priority, and he’d left like it was nothing.
And, if he’d stayed with me like he was supposed to, this asshole Gerard would never have had the audacity to approach me.
Gerard was still snorting like a bull. “Do your job,” he snapped. “I’m reporting a crime. I pay your wages, you know.”
I glanced at his wife, trembling like Jell-O behind him. She was a victim too, in lots of ways, and I knew it wasn’t fair, but I couldn’t help but judge her. She’d done nothing to protect her son from his father. In fact, she’d tormented him, too, to save herself from her husband’s wrath.
“You want me to do my job? Okay.” I straightened up, towering over him, staring down my nose. Fear and anxiety made me heartless. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn't arrest you right now.”
